Apple has been building a trust and privacy foundation that’s an extension of their DNA.
Steve Jobs and his innate understanding that technology must serve human society has ensured they implemented their value system in every product.
You can’t cheaply retrofit security, privacy, trust into a product that has just had stuff glommed on and on rapaciously.
Even when you know that you need to, you need a culture transplant to value and sustain those things.
Hard to build, quick to break – ask Boeing.
Apple implements something called differential privacy. It’s quite complicated and I am no expert, but loosely summarised in layman’s terms it’s the following:
Google Assistant lives in the Cloud and knows everything about you, and so does Google (Alphabet). Everything is centrally stored.
Siri knows everything about you, but Apple does not. Personal information is securely encrypted in the Secure Enclave T2 chip built into Apple Silicon. Non-identifying data is shared to the cloud.
AI is only truly useful if it’s personal and intimate to you. The AI in “Artificial Intelligence” is in service to augmenting your intent. Co-Pilot is an agent to do stuff, but it’s not yet an Assistant you will trust with your personal information – health telemetry, relationship telemetry, transaction history – stuff which you trust it to mine and understand in service to you without compromising your privacy.
Are you going to open your credit card history to Google? Hell no – I barely trust my bank and I can see what they are doing with my data and the number of “partners” I get sold off to.
But I do trust Apple.
In an AI agent or Assistant world, right now, they are the only ones I trust. Not that I will think about all of this. I will love it when Siri does something magical for me that used to be a drudge – even it means Siri asking Google AI (without sharing my information) what the exciting things to do this weekend are in my hometown.
Microsoft own my trust professionally, and Apple own my trust personally…. And that’s the way I like it.
I like you at work, doesn’t mean I will invite you home to dinner.
The intimacy economy is going to be massively massively massively bigger than anything before it – remember hyperscalers hyperscale.
Apple and Microsoft are far ahead of everyone else in this race… As you can see from the popular press, most people don’t even grok it.
Doesn’t mean there won’t be the equivalent of the “Windows, Android economy” for everyone else…
